The rogue Cyclon

Nobody tells you about the weird shit that happens when you have kids. The strange and occasionally creepy things they come out with, I swear they give me the absolute shits.

Most of it can be chalked up to overeager imaginations - I hope so, anyway, because I really hope there isn't an old man with a hook nose standing behind me when I put the kids to bed, like they've often told me there is. But sometimes you get tangible proof of something weird, like these little champion of the strange - 

It is, of course, a Cylon action figure from the original series of Battlestar Galactica. I found this example in the back seat of the car and literally have no idea where it came from. It just appeared under the kid's car seat, like it had always been there.

And I know exactly what it is, because I was given the same figure when I was six, and I had it for years and years until it vanished a long while ago. It can't actually be the same figure I had for all that time, because that one's left arm broke off two weeks I was given it, and it was a one-armed robot for most of its life in my possession.

So where did this little guy come from?

I still have a handful of my first action figures. A couple of the original Star Wars figures, including my little sister's Princes Leias, which are definitely in the best condition. I still have three from the first Star Trek motion picture - these are fairly boring Spock and Kirk figures, which I didn't play with much, so it's no wonder they are still hanging around, while the awesomely detailed Klingon figure I remember getting disappeared somewhere around 1985.

The ones that have survived this long get fairly busy use from the kids, so I highly doubt they will make it down to any further generations. 

But this guy, this Cylon, he is most definitely not one of the old crew. One of the kids has obviously grabbed it from somewhere, but I have no idea where they would even have had access to antiquated toys like this.

So I can only assume it's fallen through some kind of space/time warp from the early 80s, zeroing in my blatant nostalgia for the good ship Battlestar, and the action figures it spawned. It's not the kind of weirdness I expected to have a parent, but it's the kind of weirdness I got.